Double Dog Dare Read online

  “Vree, how in the world are the dogs interviewed?”

  “Well, like, ‘Are you a good girl?’ ‘Do you want a treat?’ ‘Do you love your mommy?’ ‘Do you want to go bye-bye?’ Like that.”

  “What’s composite?”

  “Let’s see.” She tapped her chin with a finger. “Presentation. Wiggles and wags. Maneuvers. Grooming, training, general appearance, structure, coat, gait, teeth. I could go on and on forever.”

  Agreed.

  “Where do we find a dog like Bubblegum, Vree? Where did you get her?”

  “From a breeder. A championship breeder in Kentucky.”

  “That won’t work.” Bradley might notice if I commandeered one of the Bellissimo jets for the afternoon. “We’re not going to Kentucky.”

  “It wouldn’t do us any good anyway,” Vree said. “Championship breeders place puppies years before they’re born. And even if we were in line for one and she was ready to go home today, Hubba Bubba is four years old. I mean, I can’t show a puppy! We need a show dog, Davis. A purebred. One with a championship blood line. Who loves Katy Perry! What are we going to do? I mean, what? Drive up and down the streets tossing Milk Bones out the window saying, ‘Here puppy, puppy!’ and hope a champion Westie wags her tail all the way up to us? Then we borrow her? We can’t do that! What, Davis? What what what are we going to do?”

  Blindly batting around for a dog would be a fruitless endeavor.

  And dognapping was a terrible idea.

  Awful.

  What kind of person kidnaps a witch and a dog on the same day?

  (A person who loves her sister.)

  “No, Vree.” I rubbed my forehead. “We can’t go out and find a dog. We don’t have time. We need a dog to come to us.”

  “How? Take out an ad on Instagram? Facebook? Twitter? Flickr? Google? How?”

  “You’re the one who knows about dogs, Vree. Not me. What situations do dog owners get in that they need outside help?”

  “Like when they need their shots? Like the veterinarian?”

  “That won’t work,” I said. “We can’t set up a veterinarian office right here and right now.”

  “Obedience,” Vree said. “Like obedience school.”

  We couldn’t do that either. I had two babies. I couldn’t bring a misbehaving dog into my home. “What else?”

  “Boarding,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Boarding. Like babysitting. Like when you can’t take your baby with you and you have to find a sitter. I mean, I’d never ever stay somewhere Bubble Girl wasn’t welcome. I’ve thought about starting a pet hotel for that very reason, because it’s so much trouble to find sitters. But we don’t even have a people hotel in Pine Apple. What would we do with a pet hotel? Who would stay there? It’s not like we have strangers with dogs running in and out of town. When I leave Gummy Girl, which is just about never, I leave her with one person.” She held up a finger. “One. And you know who that is.”

  Her best friend. Meredith.

  I had an idea. “Give me a minute, Vree.”

  She followed me back to my office, where it took twenty.

  Celebrities and such could bring anything they wanted to the Bellissimo suites—lions, tigers, or bears. The general-population guests in the seventeen hundred hotel rooms couldn’t. No pets. I wiggled into the reservations block of the Bellissimo website and added an entry at the bottom of the dropdown menu under number of guests—NUMBER OF PETS. I slapped up a webpage that routed straight to me, linking the pet option, and just like that, the Bellissimo Resort and Casino was pet friendly. We were the largest casino resort east of Las Vegas, and the reservation page of the website took several thousand hits a day. All I had to do was wait for a pet to check in.

  In ten minutes, my webpage had fourteen views, ten of those making pet reservations. Nine in the future, one arriving tomorrow. “We have a pet.”

  Vree picked up her head from the other side of my desk. “A Westie?”

  I had no idea.

  “A girl?”

  I hadn’t thought to ask for any details other than how many pets, the date they’d arrive, and names of the pets. It occurred to me, for all I knew, the pet arriving tomorrow could be a cat. Or a rattlesnake. Or a gorilla. “Yes,” I said. “A girl.” A girl what, I didn’t know. “Her name is Princess.”

  “What are you two doing back here?” I jumped a foot when my husband appeared in the doorway, with a sleeping Bexley on one shoulder and a sleeping Quinn on the other.

  * * *

  Somehow, I made it through the rest of the day.

  At least a dozen times, I got busy with the girls and forgot for three seconds, only to inwardly collapse with panic and guilt when I remembered. Another dozen times, I opened my mouth to tell Bradley everything. I stopped myself half of those times and he stopped me the other half. Either his phone rang, Bex or Quinn or both caught his attention, or Vree interrupted. Nervous energy coursed through me, and it was all I could do to maintain a semblance of normalcy. I had to believe Meredith wasn’t in immediate or direct danger—Gully didn’t have it in him—but at the same time, I was living and moving through a thick fog of fear, because with the proof-of-life picture, I realized there was a reason he had her. Not necessarily what I would consider a good reason, but a good Gully reason. What was it?

  Something about the picture was bothering me.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Not to mention I promised Fantasy I’d do my best to get Bootsy out of her bonus room as soon as humanly possible, by the next day at the very latest, and almost as bad as anything else, along with the dog library, Bianca sent down what she wanted me to wear representing her at the judges’ table—horse clothes. They were horse clothes. Equine couture. English riding breeches and jodhpurs. Show coats, turtlenecks, ascots, gloves, boots, and top hats. I pulled off the lid of a white satin box, thinking there’d be a fox head stole in it, and found a nine-foot braided leather riding crop.

  I could be looking at the worst week of my whole life.

  I had one chance to get to my office late that afternoon, when a call came in from the front desk that Bradley was needed downstairs to meet and greet a VIP guest checking in. That only happened a handful of times a year, so that would make the guest an Extra Special VIP. The ESVIP was an oil baron; he and his entourage, including a first-time contender on the dog-show circuit, would be my neighbors for the next week, staying in the Jay Leno Suite, the other half of the twenty-ninth floor, with our home being the first. (Half.) Bradley stopped what he was doing. “I’ll be right back, ladies.”

  “Aren’t you going to change?” It was Saturday. Jeans and Nikes.

  “Davis, our guest is blind.”

  That was a first.

  “Back in ten,” he said. “Or fifteen.”

  I could use twenty. Hours.

  Bexley and Quinn were in their highchairs trading bananas and Cheerios, donating plenty to the floor, and while Vree had her head pointed in their direction, I don’t think she was really seeing them. The sadness playing all over her face couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with my daughters. Her heart, like mine, was in Houston. The second I heard the front door close with Bradley on the other side, I said, “Vree, watch the girls.”

  “I am watching them. Where are you going?”

  I was already on the other side of the kitchen island. “I’ll be right here,” I said. “In my office.” Staring at the picture of my sister.

  What was the look of quiet resignation on Meredith’s face? Why, despite the fact she was clearly uncomfortable, was her expression also one of acceptance? Why wasn’t she mad? What was the passivity? What was Meredith’s…conflict?

  * * *

  Later that night, after tucking in my tired girls, I didn’t fall asleep so much as the fatigue and worry of
the day got the best of me, effectively flipping my off switch. Or maybe it was Vree piping down after I plied her with red wine, giving me permission to let go for a few hours. Or that Bradley was so busy preparing to be out of town—non-stop phone calls, last-minute itinerary changes, and three quick trips downstairs to his office—he’d stopped asking when Meredith would arrive. When he had asked, I gave him my best answer, the one I hoped and believed was true—she’d be here soon. I remember him climbing into bed after me, gently rousing me to ask again if everything was okay. Half asleep, I told him it was. It worked, as much as lying to your husband ever worked. At the time, I didn’t have the words to explain the lunacy of my hometown raining down on us again. We lived two hundred miles from Pine Apple and we might as well have lived on Main Street between Meredith and my parents, in terms of how often our lives were detoured by the small spot on the Alabama map that I called home. If it weren’t my ex-ex-husband Eddie (long story) or his mother (longer story) it was, like now, my immediate family. I was weary of my past dominating Bradley’s present—it wasn’t fair to him—and at least until I had more to work with, I would handle it myself. Bottom line, Meredith wasn’t where I wanted her to be, or where she was supposed to be, but I believed in my heart Gully meant her no harm. The situation needed a solution, no doubt, which would come in time, hopefully very little time, time I didn’t want to take from my husband. Whatever craziness Gully had up his sleeve, one of us worrying about it was enough.

  Thus the lie.

  Maybe I’d find the words the next day.

  Then it was the next day. By ten minutes or so, when Fantasy called.

  “Davis?” Bradley clicked on the bedside lamp. “Fantasy needs to talk to you.”

  I sat straight up in the bed. “Meredith?”

  “What? Davis?” He reached for me with a gentle shake. “Wake up. Fantasy needs to talk to you.”

  I took the phone. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I know exactly what time it is,” she said. “I just left work. I’m in my driveway.”

  Consciousness crept my way. Slowly. “And?”

  “Davis, there have to be at least a hundred blackbirds on the roof of my garage.”

  “Who?”

  “Birds. Blackbirds. Maybe two hundred. In the middle of the night on my garage roof.”

  “If they’re black, and it’s the middle of the night, how can you see them?”

  “Because there’s a full moon.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why she was waking me to talk about full moons and blackbirds on her garage when I remembered who was in the bonus room above her garage. “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want you to tell me who I have locked in my bonus room.”

  “Fantasy, they’re birds. Just birds.”

  “I want this woman off my property, and I mean it this time. Not that I didn’t mean it the last time.” She hung up on me.

  “Davis?” Bradley, who’d been on the receiving end of my side of the crazy conversation, asked again, “What is going on?”

  I mumbled a non-answer, mostly vowels.

  “Obviously, something’s going on. Is it that you don’t want to tell me or that you don’t want to bother me with it?”

  “The second one.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Everything’s okay. Let’s get some sleep.”

  Everything was not okay, and sleep wouldn’t come again for me.

  An hour of insomnia later, I realized what it was about the picture of Meredith that was bothering me. It was the window. The window Meredith was staring out had a handle. A turn handle that cranked out in a single pane to create a wide glass awning. Why hadn’t she cranked it out? Opened, two of her and two of Bubblegum could fit through, and it couldn’t have been more than a four-foot drop to the ground. For that matter, why hadn’t she locked or blocked Gully and Gina in the small back bedroom or tiny shower stall of the Winnebago, grabbed the dog, and made a run for it? And what was it I’d seen on her arm?

  I made a dark run for my office.

  Enlarging the picture, blowing it up to grains on the screen, I saw what my subconscious had seen hours earlier. It was the edge of a milky white vinyl wristband around her left wrist, which was tucked behind her right arm. Meredith was wearing the kind of wristband issued at amusement parks, festivals, and emergency rooms. I scrolled to the crook of her left arm and saw the edge of a clear Band-Aid.

  Gully had my sister at a hospital.

  I had to turn away from the screen, bent over double, to weigh my options. I could wake up my husband and tell him everything or leave him out of it. Either way, I had to save my sister. Immediately.

  SEVEN

  The Southern Gaming Federation, a division of the American Gaming Federation, was a trade group made up of casino operators, suppliers, and other entities with gaming interests. AGF had recently relocated its southern headquarters from Charleston, South Carolina, to Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in the late 1980s, the federation championed the two-hundred-and-forty-billion-dollar industry, supervised and protected it, and supported the 2.7 million casino jobs in forty-eight states.

  Utah and Hawaii were gaming free.

  Utah made sense. But Hawaii?

  SGF promoted corporate and public responsibility, industry initiatives, and what my husband had more than a vested interest in, legislative and regulatory challenges faced by gaming. More than anything else, the gaming federation served as the industry’s voice on Capitol Hill.

  Bradley, a casino attorney before he was a casino CEO, loved everything about it, and never missed the annual symposium. I think he loved that it was his field: gaming, but without the gaming. No smoke. No liquor. No cash to protect. No bells, whistles, or angst. While it was easy, and fun, to watch a gambler bet five dollars and win a million, it happened very rarely, whereas he saw the darker side of gambling every day. And it wasn’t easy, or fun, to watch a player donate his or her life savings to a Jumbo Lap of Luxury Double Deluxe Bonus slot machine. Gamblers seldom left the casino as happy as they’d arrived. And while Bradley had justified the moral aspect of gaming long before the girls were born—the players knew what they were doing—he was increasingly concerned about how we’d introduce and explain the ethics of his chosen profession to them as they grew. We both were. My concerns weren’t as gambling centric as his were. It bothered me more that Bexley and Quinn would never play in their own backyard, because their backyard was a casino, than it bothered me they’d know what double down on aces meant before kindergarten.

  All that to say this: The Talk was coming. We were quietly preparing. We loved Biloxi, we loved the Bellissimo. We’d met and married there. The view of the Gulf from every window of our home couldn’t be beat. But did we really want to raise our daughters there? If not, where? Realistically, attorneys could work anywhere. And if it ever came to it, law enforcement, which was to say me, could too. But what would that look like? East Texas, where he was from and where his mother lived? No. Pine Apple, Alabama, my home? No. (NO.) Lately, it looked a lot like Nashville. Bradley was thrilled when SGF moved its headquarters—it would be, if we were to pursue it, a smooth move from casino CEO to SGF administrator—and as such, he’d been dropping Nashville nuggets on me for weeks.

  “Davis? Did you know the driveway at Andrew Jackson’s home in Nashville was shaped like a guitar decades before Nashville was known for country music?”

  I didn’t.

  “Davis, listen to this. Nashville has a full-size replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park.”

  Really?

  An hour later, “Davis, Seabiscuit was from Nashville.”

  “The horse?” I asked.

  “The horse.”

  In the weeks leading up to the symposium, Bradley’s fascination with Nashville
whittled down to one primary, three major, and three minor points of interest. Primary: it would be a great place for us to raise our daughters. Major: the Southern Gaming Federation, Harpeth Hall School, and Vanderbilt University. Minor: Brentwood (the suburb of), the Tennessee Titans, and the Nashville Predators. While some had a one-year plan and others a five-year plan, Bradley operated on a ten-year plan until we became parents, then he began projecting further. Now he planned twenty years into the future, all the way to our daughters graduating from Vanderbilt Law School. He had yet to speak the words, “We should think about Nashville,” but I could hear them nonetheless. The day before Meredith didn’t arrived, he’d said again he wished the girls and I could go with him, and asked me if I knew the closest casino to Nashville was almost two hundred miles away.

  I did not.

  I did know the draw of Nashville and thoughts of our family’s future were on his conference agenda. And I didn’t want to, nor did I want him to, change his plans. The next morning, it took everything I had to kiss him bye. But not only did he want to go, for professional and personal reasons, I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, make him part of what I was about to do.

  * * *

  I only had one interest in Nashville.

  A son for us, a brother for Bex and Quinn.

  Because that was a decision already carved in stone: no more casino babies.

  Two was enough.

  * * *

  The first thing I did on the second morning of my sister’s captivity was see my husband off. As hard as it was to keep a straight face when I told him all was well—I had this—what I really had was a feeling that letting him go wouldn’t be the hardest part of my day.

  Next, I sent out an SOS to the girls’ nanny, July Jackson, to tell her I needed her ASAP.

  “I’ll be there in ten.”

  She could get to me in ten because, like us, July lived at the Bellissimo. In a condo on the twenty-fifth floor. She helped me with Bex and Quinn four days a week, Monday through Thursday, from ten until two. For the most part, she came to us, because we lived in ten thousand square feet, and that meant endless hide and seek. But with all that had happened and all that might, I thought it best for the girls to be offsite. So I asked July to take them downstairs to her Bellissimo home. Which, for the girls, was like going to Disney.